As a Salt Lake Bees relief pitcher, Ralston Cash comes to Smith’s Ballpark not knowing if he’ll be needed in a game.
If he pitches Saturday night, Cash will experience all kinds of emotions. The Bees are staging their annual “Pack the Park Pink Night” promotion. The observance of cancer victims is pretty much a standard event in pro sports, and this one especially will hit home for Cash, whether he appears on the mound or just watches the whole game from the bullpen.
He’ll be wearing a jersey with “Ralph” on the back, honoring his father who died of cancer in 2012, and his teammates will do similar tributes. Cancer is personal to Cash, who has responded to his father’s passing by creating a charitable foundation that tries to comfort families who have lost a parent to the disease, providing Christmas gifts.
When he says every interaction with those families is “life-changing,” he’s talking about the effect on himself.
“It obviously breaks your heart,” he said, “if you have any empathy.”
The back story is that Ralph and Sue Cash raised Ralston from the time he was 4 years old. Their daughter, Angie, died in an auto accident, and Ralston’s biological father was out of the picture. So his grandparents made him their son, as he grew up in Georgia and became a second-round draft choice of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Cash’s pro baseball career has not gone exactly as he hoped. A hip injury as a Odgen Raptors rookie in 2010 cost him an entire season, and he has not made it to the major leagues — although he pitched in Triple-A in the Dodgers’ system in 2016 and is back at that level with the Los Angeles Angeles-affiliated Bees. Along the way, his father died in January 2012, due to bladder cancer.
Cash didn’t wait until he got to the big leagues to make an impact with others. He started giving back, even before officially creating his foundation. Using social media, he sought families in Georgia who were affected by cancer in hopes of making their Christmases brighter, and he keeps doing so — sometimes with traditional gifts, other times with creative ideas.
He helped one family visit relatives in California; for another, he arranged a mountain retreat. In another case, he simply provided a Christmas tree. “You really can’t believe the emotions that came through that,” he said.
On the mound, Cash is having what he labels “a rough year with my career” at age 26. He has appeared in 14 games for the Bees, allowing 25 earned runs in 21.2 innings. He’s coming off a 2017 season when he discovered food allergies that caused him to lose 35 pounds and made him reconfigure his diet. Cash is healthy now, but is not performing as he would like.
And he wishes his father could help him. “I miss Dad,” he told his mother in a recent phone conversation. Sue Cash responded, “Your father spent his life telling you that everything’s going to be OK.”
Ralston Cash will honor his father Saturday, wearing a jersey that he’s eager to give his mother. And he’ll be thinking about others affected by cancer — including a 5-year-old girl named Harper whom he recently met in Salt Lake City and is dealing with leukemia.
They bonded quickly, as people have a tendency to do with him. Intrigued by the tattoos on Cash’s arms, Harper used a marker to draw her own designs. Cash intends to have her drawings become permanently inked, even if they interrupt “the flow” of his other tattoos.
It’s only fair that someone affected by cancer will make a lasting impact on Cash, considering what he’s doing to make a difference for others.
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